Dan Snow's History Hit - General Franco

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

From 1939 to 1975, Generalissimo Francisco Franco ruled Spain as a nationalist dictator. For many, he was Spain incarnate, a tenacious leader and warrior in the same vein as El Cid. Under his guidance, the regime was able to navigate 36 years of political turmoil and conflict, vanquishing Communism, surviving the Second World War and bringing about economic prosperity. For others, this idealised portrait stands in stark contrast to the reality of his rule, which was instead defined by incompetence, violence and self-interest. So who exactly was Francisco Franco, and why is he such a divisive figure? Sir Paul Preston, the acclaimed historian and biographer of General Franco, joins Dan to untangle the complex and conflicted legacy of Spain's most famous 20th-century leader.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi Yvonne, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now we talked about Italy and how Maloney is from a far-right party which has a more nuanced view, potentially even a positive view of Italy's fascist past. Well, the same is true in Spain to a certain extent. There's a new far-right party energised by Spain's nationalist heritage, in particular, of course, the career of General Franco. He ruled Spain from the 1930s to the 1970s. He was certainly a nationalist who was described at the time as a fascist, who was a close ally of Mussolini and Hitler, with whose help he seized control of Spain. Then he did not join them on the fascist side in the Second World War, and as a result, saved his skin and his regime. In Spain, there is a lively debate about

Franco, his legacy. Was he a great national figure, a saviour even, or was he a brutal, authoritarian war criminal? Every time we talk about Spain on this pod, we turn to Sir Paul Preston. He's a professor in the Department of International History at LSE, London School of Economics. He is the greatest historian of contemporary Spain. And he has written a biography of Generalissimo Franco in the 1990s. And he's more recently written a history of Spain and people betrayed, which you can hear my interview with him about that on the podcast just a couple of years ago, if you go back through the back catalogue. At a time when new generations are flirting with far-right critiques of globalisation, internationalism, of democracy, it feels like an important time to go back and

check out what happened the last time people got this urge. Spoiler alert, wasn't great. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is worse than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. and lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Paul, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure.

Very good to see you again. So, Franco. We've been talking a lot about fascism in the last couple of years. What were Franco's roots? How did Franco emerge? Well, first of all, I have to say that although Franco is normally in the list alongside other major fascists, I'm not sure I would describe him as a fascist. I would actually say he's worse in some respects. If we take as our starting point that fascism is Italian fascism, and that, if you like, the classic fascist is Mussolini, in that sense, he is wildly worse than Mussolini. The number of Spanish citizens that were massacred by Franco is gigantically more than the Italians who were killed by Mussolini. Bearing in mind the obvious sort of geographical differences that Hitler's field of operations was all of Europe, whereas

Franco's was merely Spain, I would be inclined more to make a comparison with Hitler than with Mussolini. But basically, to go back to your question, when I said that in some respects, Franco was not a fascist, he was something worse, that takes us to your question about the origins. He is what in Spanish terms one would call an Africanista, that's to say a colonial army officer who was formed in the African wars in Morocco. And of course, that meant a sense of colonial entitlement, of keeping control of the subject population by means of brutality. And since he then identified the working class population, particularly the rural population of the south of Spain, with the tribesmen of northern Morocco. He basically applied those same beliefs, if we can call them that, prejudices,

to the way in which he treated the working class during the Spanish Civil War. Is there a useful way of talking about him in terms of our kind of modern designations? Is he just an autocrat? Yeah, a deeply conservative, authoritarian, military dictator, with obviously very little concern for human rights, other than those of the wealthy who supported him. I mean, in one of his celebrated phrases, he congratulated himself on the fact that the Spanish Civil War was the only civil war in history, according to him, in which the rich got richer. And he was from a rich background, he's from an aristocratic background, was he? No, not particularly. He was from a military family in a very remote town in the northeast of Spain,

in Galicia, north of Portugal, in a town called El Ferrol, which was a naval base where his father was actually a quartermaster and quite well off, but certainly not upper class by any means. He did marry into the upper class. The woman he married, Carmen Polo, was from a very rich family in Asturias. And I suppose that kind of gave him expectations, shall we say, aspirations of grandeur. When we delve into his later authoritarian rule, his criminality, was it his marriage, desire to establish himself within that Spanish elite? Was it the brutalization of fighting in Africa, counterinsurgency operations? Where does his journey begin? Okay, well, the first thing I think is that what he would have liked to do as a very young man was

to join the Navy, but for budgetary issues to do with the disaster of the Spanish economy, that wasn't possible. So he had to go into the army. Now he was a very small person, so he was bullied as an officer cadet. And I think this fed into an overweening ambition. So he was determined to get on. And he did get on partly by bravery, but also by using the system, by complaining when he didn't get the right medals or when he didn't get the right promotions and so on and so forth. And he did enjoy very rapid promotions. He had gone to that part of the army where promotion was very quick. That's to say the colonial army. And he built his career there basically from about 1912.

By 1917, he was a major. And that was when he married Carmen Polo. Now, Carmen Polo wore the trousers in the relationship. She was very much the dominant figure and drove him on. Later on, when he was the dictator, when his mind was going, he would say things like, who's so-and-so? And she'd say, oh, Paco, don't you remember? We made him minister of the interior

on such and such a date. So she was very much a driving force. But I would say the basic driving force was his ambition. But then he acquired certain ideas. And his central idea, if one could call it an idea, is the notion of the Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy. That is to say, the completely mad idea that the world was controlled by the Jews and that there were then two streams of their control, on the one hand, through Freemasonry and capitalism, and on the other, of course, totally contradictory, through communism. And Franco used this notion, and talks about it, I mean, he even wrote a book about it, and this was the justification for the massacres during the Spanish Civil War, and also for the

deeply authoritarian policies, particularly of his early dictatorship. But even on his last speech, a few days before his final illness, he was still talking about the Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy. But Paul, this feels to me like laundered, off the peg, sort of international nationalist, fascist rhetoric in the way that when people are tweeting about Brexit today, you get people call you a globalist. There's various terms usually imported from the US that people like to sort of throw at you. Is there something here about Spain's ruling class seeking to make Spain great again, that the traumas of Spain's imperial experience in the 19th century, losing a vast empire most recently to the Americans,. What's going on within Spain's

ruling class that could make them so radicalized? Well, absolutely. The two things come together. I mean, the off the peg idea, which if you like, systematized the various resentments and so on, actually came from Geneva. There was an outfit called the International Anti-Masonic Entente. In the 1920s, the then dictator, General Primo de Rivera, bought a subscription to their bulletin for a number of his generals. And so Franco started to get their bulletin and indeed to contribute to it from about 1927. So that was where, if you like, the systematic ideas came from. But the idea that the Spanish ruling class were under threat, were under siege, if you like, goes back, I mean, on the one hand, there is the, why did we lose empire? Why did we lose our greatness? And that is explained by Freemasonry. It is British and

French Freemasons who stole our empire. So that kind of fits in with this set of completely mad ideas. But you've also got to remember that at the same time as there is the collapse of empire and the relative impoverishment of the Spanish upper classes, there is the beginnings, very feeble beginnings of industrialization in Spain. So you get the growth of actually two strands of a working class, a relatively moderate socialist working class, which is in the northern shipbuilding, the iron and ore of the Basque country, the coal mining of Asturias, and some industries in Madrid. That was the socialist triangle. But what really drove the fears of the upper classes was anarchism. And anarchism spread out from the appalling conditions

of the landless working class of the South that emigrated to Barcelona, to Catalonia, and to the textile industry there. And it was there from the 1890s onwards that there were the most appalling social conflicts. The political incompetence of Spain's ruling classes, combined with the corruption, led to massive social discontent, which of course effectively translated into revolution, rebellion, and so on, and violence on the streets. And of course, Franco very much fed into that because the army was the praetorian guard of the interests of the ruling classes. So the army was used to protect the ruling classes from the rise of working class violence. What's the big moment where he's thrust from a sort of angry general into a position of

potentially of political power? You mentioned working class violence. Is it the 1934 uprising, so before the Civil War, but you're seeing unrest and the army called in to maintain control or to suppress dissent? Well, there are various steps, of course. And in terms of his military career, a big leap forward is in 1922, when he gets, in complicated circumstances, gets to be commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion. And then in 1927, he gets made commander of the Spanish Infantry Academy, and that allows him to form a whole set of officers who basically believe the same tenets as he does. But as you quite rightly say, the big leap forward is 1934. And what's interesting about 1934 is that as the right

in Spain had been preparing for potential working class unrest, in 1934, there were a series of military maneuvers planning against a possible working class uprising. The guy who at the time was the Minister of War was a civilian, and he felt very much at sea. And he admired Franco, and he brought him in as an advisor. And when the real miners uprising took place in October 1934, Franco had not gone back to his post in the Balearic Islands. He still happened to be in Madrid. And the Minister of War, a guy called Diego Hidalgo, said to Franco, look, I'm all at sea here. What I'd like to do is set you up in an office in the Ministry of War. You basically tell me what to do. You issue the commands,

you write the decrees and so on, and you run the repression. Not only did this give Franco complete control over the army, navy and air force, but because of the way the Spanish constitution worked, at a time of national emergency, the Minister of War also took control of the police, the Civil Guard, and so on. So Franco had monumental power without any responsibility whatsoever. So it was kind of rather wonderful on-the-job training to be a dictator. And of course, it was known thereafter, on the right, of course, that Franco is the man who'd saved Spain. And he had applied in the northern mining areas, all of the techniques of repression that he'd learned and used in Morocco as a younger soldier. So that was really, as you quite rightly say, it was the making of it.

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absolutely overtly to seize power in Spain. Well, in February of 1936, as a result of all kinds of changes, there have been the so-called Popular Front elections, in which a relatively moderate left liberal coalition had come into power. And Franco had been sent off to be military commander of the Canary Islands. Alongside all this, a major plot, which had been in the making really since 1931 was coming to fruition for a great military plot. And then the, if you like, the distribution of roles because of Franco's eminence in the Foreign Legion, the Foreign Legion, the Army of Africa, the native mercenaries from Morocco were really the only part of the Spanish army that really functioned. And so the bit that

Franco was put in charge of was the so-called African army. And arrangements were made with right-wingers in Great Britain, and possibly with collaboration by MI6. There's a lot of speculation about that. An airplane was sent to get him from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco, where he took control of the African army, oversaw the transfer of the African army to Spain, the first great military airlift in history. I mean, now we're used to millions of hooligans being taken to Spain every year. But then this was a really important innovation. And he got the army of Africa over to Spain. And that, of course, was the beginning of his own quest for power. I mean, within days, literally within days, even before he himself had managed to get into Spain, he had created a press office. And while most of the other rebel officers were trying to fight the war, Franco was building

his image as the leader of the right-wing crusade. And of course, that was very successful. It's a complicated story. But by the end of September of 1936, he was the supreme commander of the rebel forces. He was the supreme commander of the rebel forces. And they enjoyed huge advantages because they were the most effective military units in the Iberian Peninsula. Yes, and they weren't the only advantages that they had. Of course, the biggest probably was the fact that the conservative government in Britain had imposed the policy of non-intervention, Britain had imposed the policy of non-intervention, which effectively deprived the legitimate Spanish Republic of the means of defending itself and eventually threw it into the arms of the Soviet

Union. And indeed, there was a covert approval of the fact that Franco had virtually unlimited help from Hitler and Mussolini. So the advantages were very much on Franco's side. And talk to me a little bit about his tactics. How did he go about seizing, pacifying, controlling the country? Well, Franco was a pretty dreadful general. I mean, if he'd been Rommel or Napoleon, he probably could have won the Spanish Civil War in a matter of months. But he didn't want to, because, as he said on numerous occasions, we've got lots of documentary evidence of this, he did not want to achieve a victory which left hundreds of thousands of the enemy still roaming the territory. territory. So his strategy, if one can call it that, was, again, to use his own words, a centimeter by centimeter, square meter by square meter, kilometer by kilometer conquest of territory, because the most important thing was to conquer the people. So basically,

what he wanted to do was to annihilate what in Spanish is often called el pueblo republicano, you know, the republican population. And this he did, obviously, by the massive atrocities that took place during the Civil War, by the fact that half a million republicans were forced into exile. And then, of course, at the end of the war, and then in the years following his victory in the war, maybe as many as a million people in concentration camps. Astonishingly high numbers of people. And in Britain, the rest of the world, we're familiar, of course, with Guernica, but the aerial assault on Guernica, which killed many, many people and destroyed so much property, that was just one example of the kind of tactics that were used.

Yes, absolutely. Interestingly, I mean, you mentioned Guernica, which, of course, was small beer, really, by comparison with some of the bombing atrocities, which, of course, were not the only atrocities. But there were major bombing attacks on Madrid, on Barcelona. And in fact, there is a very strong argument that actually the painting Guernica is not really about Guernica at all. That's the title. But what it mainly portrays is the bombing of Madrid. Which was on a much larger scale. Massive, of course, by comparison. Yeah. And Madrid was one of the last places to fall to the nationalist Francoist forces. Yes, within a couple of days of the end of the war.

I mean, the last places were actually on the West Coast. I mean, Valencia, Alicante, places like that, where lots of refugees were gathered, hoping to be rescued. Very few were, in fact. But again, that's a whole other story. When he won the war, there was then a round of terror to find enemies of the new regime. I mean, we're talking hundreds of thousands of people rounded up, killed at this point. Well, the majority of the killing actually took place during the war.

And if you add up the fact that so many people had gone into exile, that the Republican population was absolutely decimated. It's very difficult to give exact figures of the numbers of people killed. We know for an absolute fact, because you need the names to be able to list who was killed, we know for an absolute fact that at most 100 more or less than 50,000 right-wingers who were killed during the Civil War. Of left-wingers who were killed, we have the names of 135,000, but there are still massive numbers of unmarked graves that have not yet been excavated and so on. And there are many provinces, particularly in the north of Spain, where no investigation has been done on. And there are many provinces, particularly in the north of Spain, where no investigation has been done whatsoever. And therefore, all of the experts on this use as a

kind of rule of thumb, 150,000. But there are people who think it could well be nearer 200,000 killed by the Nationalists. And of those, whatever the final figure worked out at, again, there's some debate over this, probably those who were executed after the end of the Civil War were maybe 20,000, because more in the way of judicial procedures were in place by then. So there's a difference there. So, Paul, the Spanish did sign the famous anti-comintern pact, which sort of metastasized through the late 1930s and early 1940s into the basis of the Axis powers. Franco received help from Mussolini during the Civil War,

and yet Franco did not join in the war effort. How realistic was the prospect that he might join the war effort? Did Hitler and Mussolini expect him to make great attempts to bring him in? This is a very complicated subject. One of Franco's claims to fame, as it were, he always claimed that he was the man who saved Spain from the Second World War, whereas I would claim that he was actually gagging to get into the war, particularly in the early stages. It's interesting that at the end of the Second World War, the Francoist press proclaimed the victory of Franco as if he had sort of won it single-handedly. Basically, Franco wanted to get in because what he wanted was to secure the French North African Empire. That's what he thought he would get out of it. However, the Spanish economy had been absolutely destroyed by the Civil War.

And the Spanish armed forces, although massive, I mean, Franco had over a million men in arms at the end of the Civil War, but the equipment was appalling. I mean, many of them were equipped with rope-soled sandals. So Hitler was very keen in the early stages to get Franco into the Second World War. But the problem was, in order to do so, A, he had to promise Franco the French Empire. And of course, for other complicated reasons, it was in Hitler's interest to keep the Vichy French suite. Obviously, after June 1940, he didn't want to be fighting the Vichy French as well as the Gaullist French. So that was one obstacle. The other was he would need to rebuild the Spanish empire. I mean, Spain was absolutely on its knees. I mean,

there was mass starvation. He would need to rebuild the Spanish economy and, of course, rebuild the Spanish armed forces. And that was simply not on. And of course, the other thing is his mind was very much on Russia. So Hitler was not ready to give Franco what he wanted. So there was this kind of standoff. And it's interesting, if you read Hitler's diaries, at the end of the war, he's actually saying, it was not in our interests to have Franco. So basically, what we have is a strange situation in which it is in the interest both of the Western allies and of Hitler to keep Spain neutral, because to have him on your side would have been a nightmare. Amazingly, he ruled until the mid-1970s. And also, you still find people in Spain who will say nice things about him. What is his legacy? Well, yes, of course, he did survive until 1975.

And many people in 1945 assumed he'd go down with Hitler and Mussolini. But of course, he was saved by the Cold War. Because the Western powers were terrified of the Soviet Union, a right-wing Spain was considered a great bulwark. It was like a very large aircraft carrier with access to the Mediterranean, to the Atlantic, protected by the Pyrenees and so on. So that was, in a nutshell, why the Western powers tolerated the survival of Franco at first. Now, in terms of what went on within Spain, of course, Franco, first of all, between the end of the Civil War in 1945, he had terrorized the remaining Republicans into silence. He had managed to generalize his version of what the Spanish Civil War was about. He was the man who'd saved Spain from communism.

He'd saved Spain from all the atrocities that the left would have perpetrated if only they'd had the chance. The early process is based on terror, but subsequently it's based on total control of the education system, total control of the mass media, what we have between 1939 and 1975 is a mass brainwashing. Now, 1975 to 77 is the process of transition to democracy. The limited democracies re-established in 1977. But of course, it's democracy. There's freedom of speech. So there is not a counter brainwashing. So what we have are generations of Spaniards and their children who have been brought up believing that Franco saved Spain. And inevitably, as time has gone by, very large

numbers of people, the descendants of people who benefited from Franco, people who were brainwashed by all that propaganda. They are the, if you like, the cannon fodder of the new extreme right-wing party in Spain, Vox. Right. So in Spain today, not unlike Italy, we're seeing some of these nationalist ideas regaining in strength, feeding off a romantic image of the past and coming back to the fore. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's very well put. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. As ever, talking with you about Spain is always so fascinating, Paul.

Thank you very much. What is your book called, Remind Everybody? Well, the book we were talking about earlier is called A People Betrayed. But actually, I'm about to have out in the new year a book precisely about the Jewish, Masonic, Bolshevik conspiracy, which is called Architects of Terror. Goodness me. Well, let's get you back on to talk about that. Thank you very much indeed.

My pleasure. Goodness me. Well, let's get you back on to talk about that. Thank you very much indeed. My pleasure. Thank you.